This invention relates to the field of phone based communications. In particular, the invention relates to methods for providing serialized discussions from an asynchronous communication session.
Conference calls (and chat lines) have previously allowed multiple participants into a single communication over the phone. On a conference call there are issues with people over-talking one another (e.g. if one person is talking the others must listen), there is minimal ability to review the communication after the fact, and the conversation must take place in real time. Thus if there is only one person in a particular call then that person will be quite bored—only able to talk to herself/himself. Similarly, if there are 100 people in a particular call almost no (meaningful) communication will be possible.
Accordingly, what is needed is a method and apparatus for handling an arbitrary number of users in a communication over a telephone interface by providing serialization of the asynchronous communication.